Ben Lipschitz and the art of changing the order

The handbag was too small. That was the problem. A woman wanted to carry a spare pair of flat shoes on a night out, and a clutch offered very little room for entrepreneurial optimism. Ben Lipschitz wondered why the shoes could not fold. The answer eventually became Flipsters, a footwear business that travelled considerably further than the bag.

Years later, a café presented him with another awkward fit. FoodByUs had been built to connect people with local food makers. Hospitality businesses were finding their way into the marketplace, bringing a different set of needs. Lipschitz and his co-founders had to decide whether this was a distraction or a reason to change direction.

The two episodes make an appealing pair. One concerns the dimensions of a handbag; the other concerns the boundaries of a business plan. In both, the useful question begins with what someone is trying to do. Lipschitz’s career offers a study in that kind of attention: close enough to notice an inconvenience, and flexible enough to reconsider the product built around it.

The business that fitted in a handbag

Lipschitz was born in South Africa, the youngest of three boys, and moved with his family to Sydney when he was three. He studied law, then decided after graduation that he wanted to build a business of his own. A professional qualification can offer a route through life. He chose to leave room for a detour.

For Flipsters, he joined forces with Rick Munitz, a friend from high school who had studied industrial design. Their product used a triangular fold. Getting it small enough was only part of the challenge. It still needed to behave like footwear when opened. The customer was buying a pair of shoes, after all, rather than a particularly ambitious piece of origami.

Early manufacturing supplied a rather literal test of the idea. In an international batch bound for Australia, Canada and Austria, the soles tore when unfolded. Australia’s shipment arrived first, exposing the problem while the other orders were still on their way. A design that worked in principle had failed in production.

He had put savings intended for a gap-year trip into the venture. The money went towards making something tangible, with all the stubborn details that entails. A physical product has to survive the trip from prototype to factory to customer. Each handover gives the original idea another opportunity to come apart.

Flipsters reached 16 countries and more than 300 Australian retailers before Lipschitz sold the business in 2014. That chapter gave him experience in selling a product people could hold, fold and take home. His next venture would ask customers to adopt a different sort of convenience, one that lived inside an ordering system.

The café that changed the customer

FoodByUs launched in 2016 with Lipschitz, Gary Munitz and Tim Chandler. Gary had co-founded Menulog; Chandler had been its lead developer. Lipschitz brought his experience in operations, sales, marketing and building a brand. The three had worked together on other ventures, including the investment group Kadima Group.

The original proposition was neighbourly. Home cooks and other food makers could sell ready-to-eat meals to nearby buyers. Customers could search by food type and location. By October 2016, more than 1,000 makers across Australia had registered, with over 150 already selling in Sydney. The marketplace was designed around discovering something to eat.

By September 2017, the company had introduced a B2B platform connecting cafés with wholesale suppliers. Lipschitz explained the move with a sentence that is more revealing than a polished account of inevitable progress: “It wasn’t the original plan but we couldn’t ignore it.”

“It wasn’t the original plan but we couldn’t ignore it.”

Ben Lipschitz, on the café expansion, 2017

A café buys again and again. It needs stock for tomorrow, then the day after that. An ordering problem repeats with the business’s rhythm. The attraction of serving that customer is easy to understand; recognising it while committed to another idea is the harder part.

Lipschitz later described how the founders checked whether their existing technology could serve restaurants and examined the behaviour of those already using it. Those customers kept returning and wanted more categories. This was evidence with a practical consequence. The team could follow it without discarding the marketplace technology they had built.

There is a temptation to tidy a founder’s history until every turn looks deliberate. This one is more interesting with the turn left visible. The company name remained. The person placing the order changed. Lipschitz had to be willing to let the first explanation of his business become a chapter rather than the whole book.

Please bring your own butcher

Getting a restaurant to try software presents another problem of fit. A venue may have a supplier it trusts, a delivery arrangement that works and a way of ordering that everyone understands. A new platform enters a relationship that is already under way. Its catalogue can be extensive and still lack the one supplier the chef wants.

In late 2021, FoodByUs introduced “add your own supplier”. Restaurants could bring existing suppliers into the ordering system. The feature widened the platform’s usefulness beyond the company’s selected marketplace. It gave a venue a reason to make FoodByUs part of the whole routine.

That is a modest-sounding concession with a considerable implication. The founder’s view of a complete product and the customer’s view of a complete working day can differ. The customer needs the orders handled, including the ones that do not fit neatly into the platform’s commercial arrangements.

Lipschitz has described that supplier feature as valuable even though it did not generate revenue itself. It helped make the software the place a restaurant returned to. The argument asks a business to tolerate a useful function whose contribution arrives indirectly. That can be less satisfying on a spreadsheet than it is in a kitchen.

The financing followed years of developing the proposition. FoodByUs raised A$10 million in a Series A in November 2021, then A$12 million in a Series B announced in January 2023. Base Capital led the latter round, alongside FJ Labs, Trawalla Group and Macquarie Capital. These are company funding figures. The story behind them is the work of making a marketplace useful on both sides of the transaction.

A team cannot run on a pitch deck

Lipschitz won Entrepreneur of the Year at The CEO Magazine’s 2022 Executive of the Year Awards. He had been reluctant to enter; his PR representative encouraged him. For someone whose work involves persuading other people to try things, his hesitation is a pleasant detail. Selling a product and submitting yourself for judgement are different kinds of exposure.

His account of leadership puts considerable weight on understanding employees as individuals. What do they want? What does the organisation need? How can those interests meet? Those questions are more demanding than announcing a culture and trusting everyone to inhabit it.

A November 2023 conversation about his company culture returned to empathy, context and transparency. The combination matters. Empathy without context can leave people guessing at decisions. Transparency without empathy can turn an explanation into a lecture. A growing team needs enough understanding to act, and enough trust to ask when it does not understand.

In 2023, Lipschitz spent a week with FoodByUs’s Manila office alongside Head of People & Culture John Petty. The company’s earlier attempt to establish overseas operations had encountered border closures. Visiting the team gave the international operation a more immediate place in his own working life.

Distance changes how colleagues experience a business. A video call makes contact possible, but being in the same office creates a different opportunity to listen. His account of the visit was enthusiastic about the people and the working relationship. It is a useful reminder that an operations team is made up of colleagues, however far its desks sit from Sydney.

The invoice gets a seat at the table

By April 2024, FoodByUs was reported to be used by more than 2,000 hospitality venues multiple times a week. A trade finance product introduced the previous year accounted for 10 per cent of platform sales. Ordering had led the business into the questions that follow an order: how it gets paid, recorded and understood.

In August 2024, the company released Price Tracking. Lipschitz explained that transparent pricing is less commonplace for food businesses than for consumers. The feature lets venues review product costs over the previous 12 months and watch changes across suppliers. A bill can tell you what you owe. A history can help explain how you got there.

His advice to venues also extends beyond finding the cheapest quote. In a conversation about supplier problems, he suggested comparing three suppliers and communicating what matters to running the venue well. Price belongs in that discussion alongside the requirements of the business. A bargain is less attractive when it arrives at the wrong time.

The company’s July 2025 Index described a network of 3,000 suppliers and more than 20,000 carts processed monthly. These are company-reported measures of activity. They show how far the purchasing routine has developed from the local meal marketplace, while leaving the central task recognisable: make it easier for people to buy what they need.

A recipe he has not tried before

Lipschitz’s interests extend beyond the ordering screen. He has served as a volunteer director on the board of Redfern Legal Centre. Its account of his background identifies an interest in customer experience, technology, strategy and social impact. His legal education has a place in the story alongside the business career he chose.

He also cooks. In 2021, he described a habit of attempting a dish he had never made before at least every fortnight, with mixed results. It is a small, appealing practice: regularly agree to be a beginner, then eat the evidence. Not every experiment needs a capital raise.

In October 2024, he joined Frank Greeff for Chew the Fat, discussing business after a meal Greeff cooked. The conversation returned to customer needs, changing direction and building a team. Food, in this case, made a setting for talking about the people behind the software.

The ambition remains to make FoodByUs essential to running a restaurant. That gives the business a demanding test. It has to earn its place in a working day, repeatedly, among people who already have plenty to do. Lipschitz began by asking whether shoes could fit a smaller space. His career since has kept returning to the customer's constraints. The next useful answer may depend on noticing where his own plan no longer fits.